The American actor Scoot McNairy, who disappeared into his role as one of the American embassy staff hiding out in Tehran for Ben Affleck's Argo but left an indelible mark as a minor criminal deeply out of his league in Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly, will appear opposite Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes, Wilde) in Black Sea, a thriller that is to be the next film from British filmmaker Kevin Macdonald. The director of The Last King of Scotland, State of Play and Marley will have the pair as members of a treacherous private salvage crew searching for buried treasure in the titular body of water.

McNairy, a Texan, hasn't stopped working since his breakthrough role in 2010's Monsters. He'll next be seen in 12 Years a Slave, the third feature from English director Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame), where he's part of the enviable ensemble cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men), Benedict Cumberbatch (Star Trek Into Darkness), Brad Pitt (World War Z), Paul Giamatti (American Splendor), and McQueen regular Michael Fassbender.

McNairy and the equally busy Fassbender also feature in Frank, a British comedy about a young musician, played by Domhnall Gleeson (Harry Potter's Bill Weasley), who joins a band run by an enigmatic frontman. McNairy, who knows his way around questionable characters, will also star alongside Guy Pearce (Prometheus) and Robert Pattinson (Cosmopolis) in The Rover, David Michod's eagerly anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom, which is currently in post-production after shooting in outback South Australia.

Questionable Decisions
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is 127 years old (okay 65), will be back as the ruthless cyborg killing machine the T-800 in Terminator 5, which has a script and a start date but not a director and any stars below the retirement age; the Fifty Shades of Grey film is definitely going ahead. British artist turned filmmaker Sam Taylor Johnson (Nowhere Boy) has signed on to direct, making her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Savages, Anna Karenina) a candidate to play billionaire pleasure deviate Christian Grey; Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight) will somehow star opposite Antonio Banderas (Desperado) in The 33, the story of the Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days in 2010. Mexican filmmaker Patricia Riggen (La Misma Luna) directs.

Hanks hearts Hologram
The vast and sometimes unwieldy Cloud Atlas perplexed some when it was released last year, but German co-director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and one of the movie's leads, Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump), enjoyed working together enough to alight on a new film together (this time without the Wachowski brothers or Hugh Grant playing a cannibal). A Hologram for the King is an adaptation of a Dave Eggers novel about an ageing American businessman who makes a final attempt to secure his family's financial future by moving to Saudi Arabia to pursue a venture. Hanks, who is not quite as old as Arnold Schwarzenegger, is at the point in his career where his standing can get offbeat projects made even as the leading man romantic comedies disappear. Michael Douglas did the same in the late 1990s with Wonder Boys and Traffic, and it would serve Hanks better than another version of a ludicrous Dan Brown novel.